- Using a discrete choice experiment to elicit the demand for a nutritious food: Willingness-to-pay for orange maize in rural Zambia. Farmers say they’ll pay, if they have information about nutrition, and it doesn’t matter how you serve that information. Gotta love economics.
- Historical genomics of North American maize. No orange maize here, but clear evidence of decreasing genetic diversity in parental lines.
Nibbles: Drought, Olympic nutrition, GMO potatoes, Einkorn beer, Fast food, Coffee inputs
- More US drought data and some insights into the drought’s impact: it’s affecting the Black Sea region too.
- Another reason to improve childhood nutrition – it improves Olympic medal prospects.
- Grist gets stuck into the GMO potatoes debate. It’s about diversity, Dummie. Not that anyone cares.
- Brewing stone age beer. “The minor details make beer brewing exciting.” I’ll bet.
- The long, straight dope on a food industrialist’s approach to better fast food.
- Diversifying inputs increases Rwandan coffee farmers’ profits.
Mexican maize biodiversity documented
Via El Cuexcomate, news that CONABIO now has information on the maize races of Mexico on its website, including photos and distribution maps. It’s all part of a huge project to document native maize diversity (including the wild relatives) which was stimulated by fears ((So whether justified or not, at least it cannot be denied that these fears had one positive outcome.)) about the influx of GM maize. And since we’re on the subject of maize, today also saw an informative post on pellagra, complete with very dramatic illustrations.
Nibbles: Taxonomic search, Genebanks in China, USA, Nepal, Scaling up, Bison
- Discover taxonomic names in files, websites, etc…
- Chinese genebank collecting wild species in Tibet.
- Touring a non-government genebank. And running another one.
- Not a community one, though.
- Everybody talking about scaling up. Here’s how you do it. Probably need the media involved, right?
- Scaling up did for the bison.
Nibbles: Aspergillus domestication, Aurochs resynthesis, Drought resistance, Protected areas, Ford Denison, Ancient diets
- The National Fungus of Japan explains itself.
- The aurochs recreated in fact and fiction. And more.
- Yes, that’s what we need to make good on all those GM drought-resistance promises: a new model system. And now for something a little more serious.
- Some protected areas don’t work terribly well. Here comes the science.
- Darwinian Agriculture explained by the man himself.
- Ancient diets deduced from teeth crap and crap crap.